facilitates autonomy, personal and political. I argue that a
modified version of the all subjected principle escapes a number of the
criticisms levelled at it, and provides a clear basis for membership of the
demos. Finally, I offer future continuing subjection as a more defensible basis
for birthright citizenship while ensuring the continuity of the democratic
political community. This may be seen less as a criticism of Bauböck's
analysis than as a

I am not the first reader of Rainer Forst’s political philosophy to observe that there is a certain relentlessness and single-mindedness in his commitment to the practice of rational justification as the engine of social criticism and moral progress. 1 Seyla Benhabib, for example, has observed that Forst elevates the right to justification to the status of the ‘supreme principle of practical reason’. For Benhabib, this results in the ‘overmoralization’ of ethical and political life, overlooking both the dependence of the ‘universalistic moral point of view’ on

’s fellow critical and analytic theorists have challenged his system in part or in whole. 4 One criticism has come up again and again – that Forst’s system is unduly rationalist, even ‘absolutist’, in its moralism, hence insensitive to its own historical and cultural particularity. 5 In particular, Amy Allen and Seyla Benhabib have charged Forst with a form of Enlightenment triumphalism and a coercively linear and progressive view of history at odds with earlier generations of the Frankfurt School. For Allen, this masks the particular European and Christian origins

takes the social position of
one such sphere. Such commitments entail but do not necessitate decisions.
They potentially form public decisions within collectively binding processes
that reach consensus. It is the task of science, among other subjects, to allow
such commitments to ‘happen’.
It seems that not all things social or political can be settled scientifically. But
it also appears that ‘It is no more possible to have an immoral science’7 that
does not supplement its objective with a choice of ends, means, methods
and dialectical criticism of itself and for

the intrinsic valorisation of criticism that this involves and on the other hand in a ‘historical’ prejudice to the effect that our contemporary spaces of action, our fields of life, engagement and inquiry are themselves somehow in particular need of the leverage of reflection. Something has already briefly been said about this latter issue in the last chapter. More might have been said, too, about the different challenges that face the idea of critique in our times, and to which any ethics of critique would have to respond: for instance, the prevalence of the idea

poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari;
the queer theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; the literary and cultural criticism
of Lauren Berlant; the affect theory of Brian Massumi; the deconstructionism
of Jacques Derrida; the theories of the postmodern of Jean-​François Lyotard
and Fredric Jameson; the cosmopolitanism of Seyla Benhabib; the cyborg
feminism of Donna Haraway; the post-​secular rationalism of Jürgen Habermas;
the socialist-​
humanism of Zygmunt Bauman; and the ubiquitous Lacanian-​
Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek, to name just some of the most prominent

theorists
formulated an epistemological argument on the human potential for criticism
and reason. They suggested that the knowing subject bearing the inherent
capacity to apply dialectics in the scientific field innovates in science by extricating its social and political irresponsibility or immaturity. It was a moment of
sheer Kantianism for the Frankfurt School because it maintained the a priori
potential and the aim of overcoming immaturity, as well as a bold statement
of surmounting the Kantian Entwurf for science by means of the dynamics of
dialectics towards

such a perspective he turned his attention to science as being the sphere
where the public use of social and political reason takes place. On the other
side of scientific criticism, where Foucault questions and challenges the aporias of structuralism, he avoids the impasse of structuralism regarding practice
(mentioned in chapter two), by reconsidering the effects of science on political
and ethical practices. For Foucault, science has literally no practices whatsoever; its effects are politics and ethics, or in other but more precise words,
science happens when we

, however, when force is exercised. Force must be forsworn for reason to hold sway, and the condition in which force is held at bay is a condition of toleration.
This is a very powerful idea, which is, in fact, given clearer expression in Kant in his discussion of ‘The Discipline of Pure Reason in Respect of its Polemical Employment’. 30 According to Kant, reason depends for its workings – for its very survival – on the existence of a realm of freedom: a realm in which criticism of or challenge to even the conclusions reached through reason itself can never be

rational praxis, which owe their validity and applicability to the formation
of dialectical reason. Modernity, Luhmann claimed, lost sight of dialectical criticism and an other scientific civilization, which is accountable to society and
which can therefore bring about enlightenment. The following pages attempt
to re-​examine Luhmann’s conception of modernity and maintain that despite
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Critical theory and epistemology
the negativity of the enlightenment, modernity never detached from pursuing
an other scientific civilization, as explicated by Habermas